I’m Back – IE6 Has To Go

Work, normal summer activities and family obligations has kept me offline for the month of July so far. Even worse, it’s kept me from having fun with these contraptions.

So we’ll get back into the swing of things with a rant about Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. If your viewing this site using IE 6 you’ll see what I mean. You’re missing the page links in the top right of the header and you’ve got an extra, but empty, sidebar making for an extra wide page. And that’s after some tweaks specific for IE. While there are many that say IE does a poor job in supporting net standards even Microsoft documents CSS attributes that weren’t supported until IE 7.

In my case I’ve given up on IE. For Internet Explorer 6 this is as good as it gets and if it gets worse, oh well. For Internet Explorer 7 I’ll do the best I can (so don’t expect much – my tolerance is low). The site does look slightly different in IE 7 but it’s not much different and it isn’t noticeable unless you compare browsers and know what to look for.

I looked at Google Analytics to see what this means. According to the stats over the last 30 days the browser breakdown was:

Firefox 45% of visitors

Safari 29.6% of visitors

Internet Explorer 19.5% of visitors

Camino 2.3% of visitors

Opera 1.6% of visitors

The rest are all under 1%

Of the Internet Explorer visitors only 53% of them are on Internet Explorer 7. Come on folks, if you’re on IE 6 you need to move up to IE 7 or even better Get Firefox. While people may argue about the best browser – IE vs Firefox vs Opera vs Safari and so on I don’t know of anyone who says IE 6 is better than IE 7.

As an interesting little stat, Microsoft pushed out IE 7 through their automatic update service yet only 53% of my visitors had upgraded. On the other hand 77.75% of Firefox visitors were on the absolute latest version – 2.0.0.4 and another 10.69% were on 2.0.0.3 while only 7% were still on a flavor of version 1.x. This seems to indicate some sort of problem with Microsoft’s Automatic Update. Do people turn it off? Not trust it? Does it just not work? Have automatic updates not been turned on so people are really missing lots of patches? (My money would be on the last one.)